CTRL (2024) Review: Ananya Panday’s Above-Average Performance isn’t Enough to Overcome This Perfunctory Screenlife Thriller
In Vikramaditya Motwane’s Hindi-language screenlife thriller, he does a good job taking CTRL right from the start, beginning with the story of the popular social media influencer couple Nella Awasthi (Ananya Panday) and Joe Mascarenhas (Vihaan Samat) vlogging their perfect love lives together for their followers. Then, everything falls apart when Nella decides to surprise Joe for their fifth anniversary, only to find out he is kissing another girl in a restaurant. The incident, of course, is recorded live as Nella’s messy breakup with Joe causing a public commotion (at one point, her now-trending video becomes a source of The Kiffness-style parody blending some of Nella’s words into a song). Nella, who remains angry over the breakup, subsequently decides to erase Joe from her life and she manages to find the right one via an AI assistant app called CTRL.
Take CTRL of your narrative. Remove EXES or erase EMBARRASSING MOMENTS.
That’s one of the taglines from the CTRL website, which prompted her to sign up for an account, chose her avatar and named her AI assistant “Allen”. CTRL proves to be a useful AI app to help Nella erase every trace of Joe’s existence from her online presence from photos to videos and instant messages. Allen even suggested a social media comeback for Nella, who’s been stagnant since her breakup with Joe. The re-branding works and doesn’t take long before the number of followers skyrocketed. Many brands started approaching her, including CTRL, where the company appointed her as their brand ambassador. With the money pouring in and Nella looking happier than ever, it’s back to a perfect life. But things go sideways when the AI begins to take control of her digital life without her knowing it at first.
So far, so good and one day when Joe’s instant message states he wants to meet her at a ferry because he has something important to say to her, CTRL enters the mystery-thriller territory by the halfway mark. I was expecting Motwane will pull off something as good as Searching and Missing since the subsequent story in CTRL revolves around Nella trying to track down Joe after he has mysteriously disappeared.
CTRL predominantly takes place from Nella’s laptop and phone screens and while it takes a while to get to the main point of the title, it helps that Ananya Panday manages to carry her role well as Nella. I was invested in her online journey but as the story progresses further with her online quest trying to find out the truth about Joe’s disappearance, it somehow becomes less intriguing. The mystery-thriller angle feels banal, lacking a sense of dramatic urgency and tense moments.
Motwane, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Avinash Sampath and Sumukhi Suresh, wants to paint CTRL as a cautionary tale about the dark side of AI technology. But the story could only scratch the surface without delving deeper into the thematic subject matter, giving us the superficial aspect of everything from personal data breaches to the risks of privacy invasion, deepfakes and social manipulation. By the time the movie reaches its third act, I have lost interest in Motwane’s attempt at a pessimistic ending that results in a tepid rather than engrossing conclusion.
It’s a pity because CTRL almost convinced me this would be a captivating screenlife thriller, only to witness a potential story increasingly deflated to a disappointing end. Overall, despite a promising first half leading up to Nella’s initial investigation of Joe’s disappearance and Ananya Panday’s above-average lead performance, CTRL is a missed opportunity that fails to capitalise on the concept of the screenlife-thriller format.
CTRL is currently streaming on Netflix.
